Atlanta’s Parking (Housing) Crisis

We're building way too much parking, it's an epidemic. Why is this an issue and what's going on to address it?

Introduction

There’s a major problem brewing here in Atlanta. We have way too much parking. An entire fourth of Downtown Atlanta is just surface parking lots like this one. But behind me, is a much more pressing problem — we keep building more of it.

What’s the problem with parking? It takes up a ton of space, that could otherwise be used for things like restaurants, park space, tree canopies, or most importantly, housing.

Let’s walk around Midtown Atlanta, the booming urban district of new, modern apartment buildings. Let me introduce: the parking podium.

Hundred of units, on top of… 100s of cars. You see it everywhere.

Here, apartments, over stories of cars.

Here, apartments on top of stories of cars.

Here, condos over… you guessed it. More stories of cars.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It’s an.. epidemic.

So I find it interesting that the most expensive neighborhood in the city, dedicates so much of its air space to just… cars. Sometimes hidden well, and sometimes not hidden very well at all.

That’s when I started to research, and realize, that this problem goes way deeper than just the cars. Rent’s are driving up like crazy, and all these cars might have something to do with it.

Background

Atlanta wasn’t always full of parking. Over the past century, our political leaders have reshaped the city for the automobile. Cars, cars, and more cars. Atlanta was jam packed full of em by the 1950s.

The solution? Minimum parking laws. Cities didn’t want to foot the bill for providing parking for residents, so city leaders exported this demand to the private sector in the form of minimum parking requirements. Win win right?

These laws required business owners to provide X amount of parking based on factors such as business type, square footage, and occupancy.

What could go wrong? Surely these laws were well researched, scientific, and based on cold hard facts. Well, unfortunately, the science parking was based off of was, you guess it, completely bull****.

In almost all cases, parking requirements were created by political leaders and city councils, who just flat out made up numbers for parking laws.

It’s not actually about parking minimums

So walking around Atlanta, you really start to notice. Parking is everywhere.

You might think the answer is simple: repeal minimum parking laws, and problem solved! There’s a nationwide movement pushing for such reform, which is a super important first step. This removes the baked in requirement for parking, which stalls small business, eats away at city financials, and just flat out looks ugly.

But as much as activists might yell this in your face online, parking minimums aren’t the silver bullet. For a long time now, Midtown Atlanta has had zero parking minimums. So does Downtown. Or actually in any area of Atlanta within a .5 mile radius of a MARTA train station.

Housing Affordability

Yes, actually, Atlanta is rarely progressive in this manner. So why are we still seeing so much parking getting built? What I’ve realized, is that the parking crisis is actually just one factor in the overall housing affordability crisis. Let me explain.

The best thing we can do to keep housing prices down is actually quite simple: build more housing.

You might notice the sheer number of luxury apartments going up. This isn’t just an Atlanta thing, its happening in cities across North America. These developers almost always fill out that maximum parking requirement, or request even higher, but why when they don’t need to?

In Atlanta, within the high capacity transit district, the maximum parking values are currently at 1.25 spaces for 1 bedroom units, and 2 spaces for multi-bedroom units.

Lets look at an example. 736 Peachtree Street is currently under construction in Midtown by Austin, Texas based developer LV Collective.

This development will have 29 stories and 374 units, ranging from one to three-bedroom options. For these 374 units, they are building six floors of parking, with 418 spaces guaranteed for residents. That’s 20% of the building!

Now that’s a lot of cars! Even with maximum parking requirements, we’re still seeing developers basically build as much as possible.

The high cost of cheap parking

But lets back up a minute. What’s the issue with all this cheap parking in the first place? You can't be arguing that it isn't useful to have some car storage, what if you want to go on a road trip, go buy groceries, or have a friend over?

According to the godfather of parking critique, Donald Shoup, all this parking works against the goals of modern urban planning — “they increase urban development costs, burden enterprise, promote car dependency, and encourage urban sprawl.”

Really, all this car storage just incentivizes people to drive. Cars have hundreds of negative externalities that impact public space. And in an age where we need to encourage public transit, walkability, and overall environmental consciousness, there really is a cost to all this cheap parking — someone is paying for it.

Across the board, if parking is provided, its rolled into the cost you pay. This is true at a Walmart, and this is true at a luxury apartment complex. The developer is exporting this cost of parking to someone, and it’s usually the renter.

On average, including an above ground parking structure increases rental rents by ~$200 in Atlanta, pretty close to the national average of ~$225. Now that's a lot of money! That’s $2,400 a year burden on the renter, not including whatever carport fees you usually have to pay as well.

But across the board, Atlanta is one of the cheaper cities to build parking in. Looking at 2022’s parking construction rates, we see that Atlanta sits at $25,473 per stall. It's so easy for developers to choose parking over units - it's a relative bargain versus other cities

This is for standardized parking designs, ie, the “Texas Doughnut,” or completely separated parking decks.

Rents get even higher once you start talking about custom parking podium designs like we see in Midtown, or especially underground parking.

Underground parking has it’s benefits — it minimizes the negative effects of parking podiums by bringing residents and retail back down near street level. often times, underground projects contain less parking than their above ground counterparts.

But because providing parking is so economically viable here compared to other cities - developers still choose to build above ground, or a mixture of the options, to achieve goals of parking as an amenity.

The Catch-22

This is all worsened by real estate values that are astronomically increasing. It’s getting more and more expensive to build anything in recent years.

The reason we’re seeing all this parking is a bit of a catch-22 situation. Really, it comes down to the banks. The banks need to make their money back on their investments, and in the red hot housing market, they’re only seeing those numbers on luxury level rentals.

Banks therefore still only approve projects that include parking — luxury level projects. At the luxury level, the construction of parking is less significant. They are simply able to make more money with less units, more parking, and higher rents.

It's a massive cycle of the old Atlanta status quo. Admittedly, I was a bit disappointed coming to this conclusion. Seriously, they built all this parking is just because they wanted to??

Looking forward

Now, I think Atlanta is poised to change this status quo pretty easily. With car-free lifestyles becoming much more popular, developers and banks are starting to see less parking as a feature, not a bug.

We’ve already done one of the most important steps — banning parking minimums. But it’s not enough — recently, legislation was rejected by Atlanta City Council to ban parking minimums with the Beltline Overlay District, the region surrounding the city that’s home to high densities, lots of affordable housing, and future rail transit. (see below to get involved!)

Luckily, we already have reduced parking requirements on affordable housing developments — which is a great step in making these projects more viable. But really we need to think bigger, towards Atlanta City Councils eventual goal of no parking minimums city wide.

The future

These buildings will stand for decades. Its setting a precedent that for many decades, residents of Atlanta’s urban core will continue to drive. But we need to be more forward thinking when it comes to our urban environments.

There’s actually a good example of forward thinking in Austin Texas, that we need more in our city. This developer is building a complex with a parking podium that can actually be converted easily to housing in the future.

The solution isn’t no parking — its just less. Reducing parking does numbers for both urban spaces, and housing prices. We need to push our leaders to encourage more units for people, and less stalls for cars.

Get involved

• Atlanta: Beltline Ordinance by Atlanta City Council
  Removing minimum parking in Beltline Overlay - you saw the map, it’s a big deal!

• NPU meeting on December 7 or 14, 2023 - See here for details

• Contact your city council and get involved with the Parking Reform Network in your local area. See www.parkingreform.org to see status in your region.

References

1. Pringle, Jeshua D., et al. "Parking Policies for Resurging Cities: An Atlanta Case Study." Advisor(s): Ross, Catherine L., Guensler, Randall L., https://repository.gatech.edu/entities/publication/e44ea847-0436-421e-bc11-5e78ddcfafc4.

2. Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Aerial View of Downtown Atlanta, Georgia, 1929." Georgia State University Special Collections, 1929, http://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/ajc/id/6689.

3. Propel Atlanta. "Parking Minimum." https://www.letspropelatl.org/parking_minimum.

4. Strong Towns. "3 Major Problems with Parking Minimums." Strong Towns Journal, 2 July 2018, https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/7/2/3-major-problems-with-parking-minimums.

5. Atlanta Urbanist. "Ending Parking Minimums Is a Great Start, But We..." Atlanta Urbanist, https://atlurbanist.tumblr.com/post/686041467614019584/ending-parking-minimums-is-a-great-start-but-we.

6. City of Atlanta. "16-28.014.14 High Capacity Transit Parking Requirements." 30 Oct. 2023, https://library.municode.com/ga/atlanta/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=PTIIICOORANDECO_PT16ZO_CH28GESURE_S16-28.014OREPAREGEPRSEALSE16-28.013SE16-28.0087.

7. Parking Reform Network. "Parking Reform Mandates Map - Atlanta, GA." https://parkingreform.org/mandates-map/city_detail/Atlanta_GA.html.

8. Transfers Magazine. "How Developers Respond to Parking Reform." Issue 6, https://transfersmagazine.org/magazine-article/issue-6/how-developers-respond-to-parking-reform/.

9. Shoup, Donald C. "The High Cost of Free Parking." Journal of Planning Education and Research, vol. 17, no. 3, 1997, doi:10.1177/0739456X9701700102, http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/HighCostFreeParking.pdf.

10. GraphingParking. "How Much Does Parking Increase Rent?" 2 June 2015, https://graphingparking.com/2015/06/02/how-much-does-parking-increase-rent.

11. WGI Solutions. "Parking Structure Cost Outlook for 2022." Guiding Golden, https://www.guidinggolden.com/19272/widgets/60954/documents/40411.

12. Shoup, Donald C. "The High Cost of Free Parking." Journal of Planning Education and Research, vol. 17, no. 3, 1997, doi:10.1177/0739456X9701700102, http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/HighCostFreeParking.pdf.

13. Transfers Magazine. "How Developers Respond to Parking Reform." Issue 6, https://transfersmagazine.org/magazine-article/issue-6/how-developers-respond-to-parking-reform/.

14. Axios Atlanta. "Beltline Parking Minimum Policy Blocked." 28 Aug. 2023, https://www.axios.com/local/atlanta/2023/08/28/beltline-parking-minimum-policy-blocked-atlanta.

15. City of Atlanta. "Sec. 16-36A.009 - Parking Incentives." https://library.municode.com/ga/atlanta/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=PTIIICOORANDECO_PT16ZO_CH36AAFWOHOBEOVDI_S16-36A.009PAIN.

16. Atlanta City Design. "Remove Residential Parking Minimums." https://www.atlcitydesign.com/remove-residential-parking-minimums.

17. YIMBYLAND. "Tweet." Twitter, 28 Nov. 2023, https://twitter.com/YIMBYLAND/status/1663570504265998337.

18. Austin Towers. "Inside the 506 West Residential Tower's Incredible Retrofittable Parking Garage." Austin Towers, https://austin.towers.net/inside-the-506-west-residential-towers-incredible-retrofittable-parking-garage/.